WSEAS and NAUN: Two Publishers (and Conference Organizers) to Avoid

These two companies are owned by the same individual and are all about profit and not about scholarship, in my opinion. WSEAS is the original company, NAUN appeared more recently. Both organizations gratuitously use the terms “academy,” “society,” and “union.” They are really just for-profit companies seeking easy income.

WSEAS publishes 18 journals; NAUN publishes 19. Their journals and conferences all have a broad scope (e.g., International Journal of Computers). This means that more papers and talks fall within each journal’s or each conference’s scope, so the owners can make more money. Conferences are a very lucrative business — and many universities subsidize their faculty’s conference travel. These companies are set up to exploit this situation.

If you’ve been spammed by either of these two firms, you’ll remember that their conferences often have their “deadlines extended” and each extension generates another spam email. I think these extensions are planned in advance and provide another excuse to send out additional spam emails to busy researchers.

Their conferences are expensive; registration is typically €450 for non-members and €400 for members, but membership costs €100. The registration fee includes the publication of accepted presentations in the conference proceedings and the “chance” to publish an extended version in one of the groups’ journals, perhaps for an additional fee.

I think these companies just pander to university faculty needing scholarly activities to add to their CVs — conference presentations and journal articles.

Like OMICS, these organizations hold multiple conferences in the same location at the same time. For example, both WSEAS and NAUN will be holding a total of ten conferences in Salerno, Italy from June 3-5, 2014:

Post navigation

27 Responses to WSEAS and NAUN: Two Publishers (and Conference Organizers) to Avoid

Deadline extensions are the norm for conferences. I haven’t heard of a single conference that didn’t have extensions, even extremely high profile conferences like IEEE S&P have it (see e.g. this year’s).

The conferences are realy of a very low quality and they publish everything as it is submitted in their conference proceedings. The owner is a greek that is currently a professor in the technical university of Sofia, Bulgaria (therefore the conference tax for bulgarians, greeks, romanians sometimes is much lower). The conferences are bad, but for us it is sometimes a chance to meet colegues.
As for the journals- they do not require aditional fee to publish the extended paper in their journal. They do not require a processing charges even if You submit a paper to some of their journals without any participation at one of the conferences. And yes the journals are weak, but indexed by Scopus:http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=World%20Scientific%20and%20Engineering%20Academy%20and%20Society&tip=pub

and some of their journals (a significant part) are with impact factor as well. As you can imagine during promotion procedures these are classified as a totaly legitimate publications in impact factor journal …
I cannot recommend to anyone to publish there, but I can understand the people that are doing it. After all if both Scopus and WOK think that these are legitimate journals I am afraid, that no one will hear the recommedations …
And the conferences of WSEAS are predatory, however the journals do not require payments and there is a real peer review process (as You can imagine not so strict but still real).

I second Joro Paveto’s opinion, as I had personal experience both with WSEAS conference and journal. I emphasize the fact, that while the conferences are costly, the journals are open-access and free-to-publish at the same time, which is quite unique combination, and that would partly justify the high conference fees. The scientific quality is generally not exceptional, but especially the journals indexed by Scopus and WOK may still have some value for young scientists.

As far as I know, Jeffrey Beall has always put his name to his comments here, made available his research publication history and along the way incidentally laid himself open to legal attack, anonymous abuse and orchestrated online campaigns against him.

I must say that Jeffrey Beall makes some forthright comments and exposes issues related to conferences and journals. Many publishers are in it for the money and many organizations have very poor quality documents. I have participated in 5 WSEAS conferences and I find the exchange between scholars attending the conferences stimulating but certainly not at the potential it could be. I do not publish my best research in WSEAS, but it is a place to start for some of my younger colleagues and students, working towards better periodicals. I have certainly attended in my career much worse than WSEAS and I have attended much superior academic conferences too. Jeffrey is correct in urging scholars to strive to find better and best venues. At the same time I am sympathetic to my colleagues in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, … I have met many of them and give them my support to improve the quality of their efforts, it is not always an easy journey. Lets hope that we can all start raising the bar and improve the quality of scholarship.

I hope that some WSEAS and NAUN officials engage in the discussion and I urge Jeffrey Beall to keep informing us with his insightful opinions and ideas. Thanks Jeffrey.

For me, it is no harm for you to attend the conference. You may not get suggestion from the audience for normally less than 10 seats are occupied but then for a junior researcher it gives you the idea of how to present your paper internationally with international standard of content.

You can check that yourself. Quick Scopus search for word “WSEAS” in jornal/conference title shows 17 WSEAS journals in database, with 2 of them discontinued. Numbers of conference proceedings articles [ year(articles)]: 2011(1457), 2012(93), 2013(89). No results for 2014 yet. The drop between 2011 and 2012 is probably saying something, but maybe I just have to try to search some other way, like search for specific articles or titles.

I had been working for WSEAS for almost a year and they are laughing stock. All Operations can be summer with the folliowing:

Meat-Scientists + AnyPaper = Profit + ChangeForVisibilityORVacations.

Mastorakis himself is a happy plumpy man, who keeps within the business just for Profit. Please mind that he is working for Hellenic Navy and it is FORBIDDEN to run a personal business. Thus he names it non-profit and haves his wife or relatives as doormen..

I have had a look at this website, and because they don’t publish any journals, they are not eligible for my list. It appears that they just organize (low quality) conferences and they tell attendees to submit their presentations to good journals. I agree with your observation and would advise all researchers to avoid these conferences.

conferences are meant to exchange the views and meet the colleagues of your domains. sometimes idea is unique and is not bound to come from Newton like minds.Today, the world is dynamic but requires incremental steps and these steps are icons and requires only one thing and that is integration. good or bad, it depends upon user. Regarding earning by them, they put on efforts and they make money which is their right. How many students getting free facilities of education in universities direct their efforts in a productive way? what is their real contribution to body of knowledge with free facilities ? of course! negligible as compared to students who pay heavy amounts. Look! teachers and atmosphere is same but what matters is what you want and how you behave! you may disagree my view point but WSEAS is doing good job. At least it is providing a respectable forum for discussion to intellectuals instead of making money through fraud or fake /mushroom institutions. instead of negative views i think we all should give them suggestions for improvements so that they should be more motivated and serve research society in a better way.
i would love to suggest them to start inviting the people who have reservations about their integrity and clear their minds openly.
well done WSEAS and keep it up.